Temple of 1001 Buddhas v. City of Fremont
- Charles Breyer
- 3:21-cv-04661
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 2
In Temple of 1001 Buddhas v. City of Fremont, Judge Breyer denied the City’s attorneys’ fees motion because plaintiffs’ poorly pleaded claims were not frivolous.
The City of Fremont did not receive the attorneys’ fees it requested. The plaintiffs avoided a fee award against them, although the opinion states that their claims had previously been dismissed with prejudice.
What happened
Temple of 1001 Buddhas v. City of Fremont followed the court’s dismissal with prejudice of all claims in the plaintiffs’ second amended complaint. The plaintiffs appealed, and the City asked the district court to award it attorneys’ fees.
The court explained that a defendant may receive fees in certain civil-rights and religious-land-use cases when the plaintiff’s claims were frivolous, unreasonable, or groundless. The court considered the claims as they appeared when filed, rather than assuming they were unreasonable simply because the plaintiffs ultimately lost.
The court found the question close because the plaintiffs repeated problems identified in earlier orders, but concluded their claims were not quite frivolous. Judge Breyer denied the City’s motion for attorneys’ fees and recommended that the plaintiffs and their lawyers be more careful in future filings.
The detailed version
- Temple of 1001 Buddhas v. City of Fremont · No. 3:21-cv-04661
- Charles Breyer
- July 22, 2022
Background
On May 18, 2022, the court granted the City of Fremont’s motion to dismiss all claims in the plaintiffs’ second amended complaint, with prejudice. The plaintiffs appealed to the Ninth Circuit. The City then moved for an award of attorneys’ fees.
Legal standard
The court explained that, under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b), a court may award a reasonable attorneys’ fee to a prevailing party other than the United States in an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 or the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. A prevailing defendant may receive fees when the plaintiff’s civil-rights claim was frivolous, unreasonable, or groundless, or when the plaintiff continued litigating after the claim clearly became so.
The court must assess the claim when the complaint was filed and may not reason after the fact that the claim was unreasonable merely because the plaintiff did not ultimately prevail. The court also stated that a case is frivolous only when the result is obvious or the plaintiff’s position is plainly without foundation.
Court’s analysis
The court described the issue as close. Across three complaints, the plaintiffs’ claims clearly failed as a matter of law or were implausible. The plaintiffs also repeatedly failed to follow instructions in earlier court orders about how to amend their claims and repeatedly raised claims with the same problems. They recapitulated theories of liability that had already been rejected, despite having few or no significant new facts.
Nevertheless, the court concluded that the claims were not quite frivolous. Although poorly pleaded, the plaintiffs appeared to believe they were addressing the deficiencies identified by the court. The court also did not want to discourage lawyers from taking civil-rights or religious-land-use cases because of the risk of a substantial attorneys’ fee award. The court warned that it could have reached the opposite conclusion and strongly recommended that the plaintiffs and their counsel be more careful in future filings.
Disposition
The court denied the City of Fremont’s motion for attorneys’ fees. The opinion does not alter the court’s earlier dismissal of the plaintiffs’ claims; it addresses only the City’s request for fees.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.